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I haven’t exactly rushed out my 2008 Top Ten list. Really, I just didn’t much feel like it. There are plenty of movies I truly admire, but somehow, my passion is just not inflamed as it should be at the end of the year. Here are 21 runners up: Battle For Haditha, Beaufort, Beauty in Trouble, Blindness...
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I really don’t feel like reviewing Seven Pounds today. I’m not sure that I will feel like reviewing it any day soon. Why? Because it is a “feel” movie, not an “intellectualize” movie. As a result, I have been explaining, in private conversations since I saw the film, that it is exactly the kind of movie...
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The problem with Valkyrie is really simple… it was a terrible idea when they started and nothing that a large group of very talented people did could overcome the core problem of this story. It’s a movie about a vain loser that doesn’t want to be about failure. There is a way to make a movie about failure...
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I want to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button again before really digging into it. (Idiots who think that "yay" or "nay" is the same as a review deserve the shallow level of thought they embody.) That said, what is intensely striking about the film, for me, besides the beautiful...
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I love Luhrmann. I do. I think he is one of those directors who has incredibly good taste, loves to walk on the tightrope without a net (his logo at the top of Australia includes the line – paraphrased – “A Life Live Without Risk Is A Life Only Half Lived”), delivers images and conceits that no one else...
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The films here in Amsterdam have been quite good. I am sad to be headed home before seeing more of them… many, many intriguing titles will turn up in the second half. But the two clear home runs for me were nearly back to back. Both were, not shockingly, by veterans. First, Vikram Jayanti has a new-ish...
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I don’t actually a lot to say about the new James Bond movie. It is, more than any other Bond (except Moonraker , I suppose) a sequel. The Bond catchphrases are gone. Sex is downplayed. Etc, etc, etc. But I really had just one major problem with the film… the action sucks. Marc Forster is a talented...
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Reviewing Doubt really requires two different bits of discussion. First, there is the movie and its overall structure, skill level, etc. Then there is the question of what the movie is actually telling the audience… which is a matter of no small controversy. First things first… Doubt is an adaptation...
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Part 2 of this review is really a discussion of what I feel actually happened in the story of the movie Doubt . ALL SPOILERS, ALL THE TIME I would really not suggest reading any of this entry until after having seen the teh film or the stage play. But when people do, I suspect we will have a lively conversation...
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The common refrain when describing Kurt Kuenne's documentary "Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father" is that you shouldn't -- that the shocking events that occur over the course of the film should blindside audiences as much as they blindside the filmmaker and his subjects...
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Another quickie... The conversion from stage to film is pretty much perfect. It is very, very much the stage show well turned into a film. Ron Howard does an excellent job, though the only real new image idea he found was the Pacific Ocean as a backdrop for Nixon's banishment... lovely. Frank Langella...
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Changeling is an interesting true story. A woman in the late 1920s, a single mother with a low-end (but rising) management job at the phone company, comes home one day after being called unexpectedly into work on an off day and finds that her son is missing. Five months or so later, her son is returned...
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When the "South Park" boys looked at George W. Bush not long after he'd been sworn in in 2001, they saw in the malapropism-prone Texan we'd sort of elected the perfect sitcom character, a genial doofus whose hijinks could always be resolved in the space of half an hour, even though...
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"I'm Gonna Explode" An unhappy girl and a troubled boy meet in detention in their high school in a suburb of Mexico City, and before you can shout "Holy Nouvelle Vague, Batman!" they're running away on a dreamy days-long adventure together, having found their perfect co-conspirator...
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on
10-15-2008
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Filed under: Festivals, Reviews, NYFF 2008, Arnaud Desplechin, Tokyo Story, Night and Day, Sergei Dvortsevoy, I'm Gonna Explode, Hong Sang-soo, Tulpan, Lucrecia Martel, The Headless Woman, A Christmas Tale, Kiyoshi Kurosawa